It wasn't an error. It was a deliberate strategy, they still do it, they sometimes admit that they do it (without consequence) and it was more than just Fauci/CDC. A few other examples:

1. The recent Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines was awarded not on scientific merit but to encourage people to take the vaccines, and to reinforce the "safe and effective" message, according to a member of the Nobel committee. Yet the prize is presented as being for scientific achievement.

2. The population was told the plan for the first lockdown was for only two weeks. Off the record, health officials were briefing top executives of large local businesses to expect much longer lockdowns. Also, one of the senior public health officials in the Trump administration admitted in a book that she told Trump two weeks whilst knowing they were going to do it for much longer. The reason for the lie about the duration was because they thought people wouldn't accept it if they told the truth.

3. The virologists writing the Proximal Origin paper knew what they were writing probably wasn't true, but feared a "shitstorm", the impact on politics and the growth of "conspiracy theories" if they said they thought it came from a lab. So they deliberately misled the public.

Climatologists are the same way. In the ClimateGate emails there are parts where they agree to suppress contradictory evidence in order to avoid "diluting the message".

The Nobel Prize is explicitly for those scientists that "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". It's easy to make the case that this is true for mRNA vaccines, whether or not a committee member thought it would encourage vaccine uptake.

We have not yet received the evidence that this is true in the long term, and have actually received quite a bit of evidence against. For example, the usage of pseudouridine and its unknown long term effects, along with the fact that it’s a commonly tested for cancer marker.

The problem is the media landscape we are in -- anything they did would have backfired because of how many bad-faith actors and angry people litter our society.

Agree. There isn’t an alternate reality where the message was received well.

Exactly right! Even though a mandated lockdown would have been received badly everywhere self-absorbed individuals reside, and whiny business owners would cry about their profits during lockdown, and bad actors would exploit Americans' lack of discipline and interest in the public good, Fauci made the situation infinitely worse by not giving America the tough love it needed and by failing to stand up the POTUS when it mattered. The was so full of double talk that he utterly destroyed public confidence in the efforts of his office. If America had locked down long enough at the beginning, likely through the end of the summer 2020, the pandemic would have resolved quickly in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Students of history and communications will look at this period for what not to do.